Below-average players do in fact have value to championship teams; in fact, MOST value consists simply in being average. Every year, pennants are lost because teams cannot find average players to fill some roles.

The 2015 Los Angeles Angels missed the playoffs by one game despite getting a ridiculous .592 OPS from their left fielders, 131 points below the league average. Had their left fielders been merely average or NEARLY average, they would have made the playoffs easily—and not merely the left fielders; had their catchers been near average, they would have made the playoffs, or had their second basemen been near average, they would have made the playoffs, or had their third basemen been average, they would have made the playoffs. They were far below average at all of these positions, and this is what cost them the chance at post-season despite having the league’s best player, Mike Trout.

In fact, I would argue that the Angels have cratered precisely because they believed in the philosophy that you are advocating: that average players don’t matter; all that matters is the stars. The Angels believed that, so they invested huge amounts of money in acquiring a few stars—and crashed and burned because they didn’t make book.

If you remember what John Mozeliak sounds like—you don’t get pregame and postgame on MLB.TV, so I have no idea—try it in his voice: Good teams fail because they can’t find creditable baseball players at every position.

Every year there are good teams, even successful teams, who stare down the concept of replacement level and spit right in its face. The Mets, who it feels like the Cardinals have been chasing for a hundred years now, gave James Loney 342 plate appearances at first base. You have, in the last couple of days, probably been made aware that the richest baseball team on earth started Howie Kendrick in left field for half their Major League Baseball games.

Late in the season, a baseball team attempted to shore up a position by acquiring Coco Crisp. The position was 1) left fielder on the 2) 2016 3) American League Central champion Cleveland Indians, because God as my witness, 4) Rajai Davis will go into their books as the left fielder of record.

Meanwhile, the Cardinals were adequate all over despite their eight most expensive players, making a total of $102 million, contributing—whatever you think Yadier Molina was worth this year.

Baseball-Reference says the other seven were worth about four wins above replacement, a not-insignificant portion of which comes from Adam Wainwright the batter.

The 2016 Cardinals didn’t just prove they weren’t the Angels—they proved they could succeed without the Aging Core we chewed up so much offseason talking about. And while on some level every successful team is unrepeatable, the core that emerged from the 2016 team can probably get the 2017 Cardinals much of the way to 86 more wins.

You realize pretty quickly, just looking up and down the WAR column, that the Cardinals didn’t replace their aging core with a young core—they replaced it with something that is not recognizable as a core. You build a young core around Kolten Wong; you build the Cardinals around Kolten Wong and two replacements.

I look at the roster the Cardinals will carry over into 2017 and I see all kinds of players I can pencil in to be roughly average, though I have no advance idea of the particular combination that will get me there. And Bill James is right: Most value comes from getting all the way to average. Every year pennants are lost because teams can’t do it. I think the Cardinals have done most of the work, and I don’t think they’ll fail like the Angels have failed.

If they don’t try to become the Angels—if Carlos Martinez and Alex Reyes aren’t aces next year, and Aledmys Diaz can’t really slug .500, and we’ve seen all we’re going to see out of Adam Wainwright, and the Cardinals can’t find anybody in free agency they like better than the understudy they've already lined up for him—they’ll still be incredibly hearty. They’ll do the same laudable job of finding value where nobody else sees it, and they’ll escape from situations that would destroy other teams.

They’ll compete, and they’ll be a hundred times more fun to watch than teams who have to—or think they have to—tank their way to the place John Mozeliak has fought to establish as the equilibrium. But if they don't reintroduce the risk that got them Adam Wainwright and Matt Holliday, they’ll still risk failing like the Cardinals fail, like this team failed: Barely.

Hi, John, Bill. You're probably wondering why I'm here. Let me get right to the point: The St. Louis Cardinals are boring, and your fans are frustrated by it.

You don't take risks, and when you do take them you don't double down—you'll trade for Jason Heyward, sure, but you won't extend him unless it's on your terms. And that's fine, in isolation! Perfectly fine.

But you only ever accept one kind of risk: The risk that you didn't quite do enough. If Mike Leake doesn't pitch well, or if three consecutive years of line-drive-hitting collegiate draft picks all peak as bench bats, you've only run the risk of having a very profitable, very flexible 81-win team.

Now, sirs—please, my name isn't important—sirs, building for the second Wild Card as your downside risk makes for exciting baseball, but it doesn't make for exciting baseball fandom, and so it becomes more boring and more frustrating to watch the Cardinals every season and offseason.

Sometimes baseball feels like a solved problem—that's not sabermetricians' fault, and it doesn't mean we can ignore what we've learned, but it's a fact of baseball fandom. And really good sports fandom requires surprise and confusion. We want to watch a winning team, but we also want to turn to each other and say, "Are you seeing this? What the hell is John Mozeliak thinking? But I guess, maybe—" No offense, John.

To get surprise and confusion on a team level, and a front office level, you have to believe that a non-rational actor might be involved in personnel decisions.

I am not a rational actor, and I am here to help.

John Mozeliak, Bill DeWitt, rational-acting members of the Cardinals front office, it's time to do something risky and dumb. I want you to—no, it is time we must—trade for Mike Trout.

Please, write this down. After security responds to the silent alarm you just triggered—I saw your foot move, and I'm not mad—but after they respond to the silent alarm they'll wrench the index cards out of my hands and I won't be able to repeat this speech.

Trading for Mike Trout is a risk. You'd have to trade a lot of flexibility, because that's the only thing the Angels could want in return, and if having Mike Trout were a sure thing—well, [laugh]—sorry, that's a stage direction I wrote down—well, ha ha, I wouldn't have even stolen the Fredbird's Dad costume from the stadium, gotten hunched down inside that snack cart, and waited overnight in your office in the first place—because then the Angels would never trade Mike Trout! Okay, NOW I'm supposed to laugh.

So it's a risk. But the reward is something more than winning 90 games and having a reasonable chance of winning the World Series: It's building a team that captures fans' imaginations! The best player in the world on a team stocked full of above-average teammates, playing in a stadium that will never let him or anybody else forget he's the best player in the world.

I tear up thinking about it, almost. So here's how you do it.

1. You trade Alex Reyes. You can't trade for Mike Trout without giving up a super-prospect in return, and you guys are lucky enough to have one! As good as he is, Alex Reyes is a pitcher, with built-in risk of his own, and if he hits your 90th-percentile projections for him he still won't be as valuable as Trout is now.

2. You throw some really good pieces in, too. When the Mariners traded Ken Griffey Jr.—who was much older than Trout is now, only I left my notes in my regular human pants so I can't say how old—they got a major-league-ready Gold Glove center fielder, a future Top 20 prospect, and a starter with some upside.

Alex Reyes is a great start, though. He'll give Angels fans something to rebuild their own imaginations around. Kolten Wong could be Brett Tomko in this set-up. And then throw maybe in some Paul-DeJong-type prospects? (You guys ever mix him up with Paul Janish? I bet you don't, since you drafted him, but man—every time I'm on Baseball Reference!)

Hey, I'm just a guy in a stolen mascot costume. I don't really know what it takes. But I'm sure the Angels will tell you. And it may seem like a lot of pieces, but you guys trust your abilities, right? You can get more good prospects where they came from, no problem. But nobody gets to draft Mike Trout.

Now, if you were just giving up the prospects you were comfortable with giving up, I think the Angels would balk on this. You hold assets close to the vest, and what I just suggested might sound like one too many. And—I feel like I can be honest with all you guys, now that we've been through this silent alarm together—I'd balk too! Right now it still feels rational. A big risk, and an exciting one, but it's missing a little something. A little Walt Jocketty.

That's why you take on Albert Pujols's contract, too.

OK, I see you aren't as surprised as I thought you'd be, and I think it's because I read this notecard once already, after I dropped them all at the beginning and they got out of order.

You take on Albert Pujols's contract, and you get to keep more of your cool assets, and Mike Trout is so good that he'd pay for both contracts! Check this out:

Pujols salary

Trout salary

2014

23,000,000

1,000,000

2015

24,000,000

6,083,000

2016

25,000,000

16,083,000

2017

26,000,000

20,083,000

2018

27,000,000

34,083,000

2019

28,000,000

34,083,000

2020

29,000,000

34,083,000

2021

30,000,000

34,085,000

Trout's $/fWAR has been $77.4, $60.8, and $72.1 million over the last three full seasons, and that's without taking any future inflation into account. You mostly don't want to pay face value for WAR, but before his poor 2016 Pujols had actually generated some value of his own. You can think of it as paying $165 million to keep some of your own prospects, if it makes you feel better.

But hey, that's just numbers! And I'm here in this prostate-awareness mascot costume, talking through this novelty T-Pain app I forgot was still on my phone, to teach us all a valuable lesson about irrational attachment and feeling.

OK: It's weird not having Albert Pujols around. Not so weird that I wish you guys were paying him $30 million in 2021 for no reason, but if he can help bring in Mike Trout? And if the Cardinals don't have a right-handed hitting first baseman?

Look, we all said some things we regret when it first happened. That was before we knew how Albert Pujols would age, and how little the Cardinals would fall off. I think people want to root for Albert Pujols again, even if it's just because they think he's gotten his comeuppance. And I don't think Albert Pujols is going to get a lot out of a lifetime personal services contract in a city where nobody has any fond memories of him.

We'll get to be around for 3000 hits and 600 home runs, and he'll be able to chase records in a place where people remember how he got into a position to do that. And he might even help the Cardinals win some games this year—if you believe Baseball Reference, he was an above-average first baseman in 2014 and 2015. Only don't look at FanGraphs.

So it works. And worst case scenario, you're out Alex Reyes and $165 million and you have Mike Trout! And hey, $165 million, whatever, but you guys are loaded, right? The food on that cart was super expensive. I could tell, even though it was pretty cold by the time I figured out how to take my beak off.

Well hey, thanks so much for your time. I hope you think about it! I'm going to try escaping, but if you want to talk more about the plan, my Twitter account is on the little cards I left on your desks—@Total, then an underscore, then—that's right, the rest is all one word. Bye!

No, you're right, the other door! Sorry, I can't really see out of the mouth that well.

We were up there, very near the top of the Tokyo Dome, when my friend turned and asked, "And he can just run... anywhere? Whenever?"

Well, on the bases.

"And if the guy--what if the guy just never pitches, does the game go on forever?"

Here I gave a very bad summary of W.P. Kinsella's The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, which I have never read, and then said that at some point the pitcher's manager would probably put the crowd out of its misery.

Then something happened in the game--I don't remember what--to put me out of my misery. I talked about the hidden ball trick a little later, and that landed well; my friends will now be looking out for it, if they are ever in some other country where they'll watch baseball with me. But it turns out I remember less than I'd thought of the article I read about The Iowa Baseball Confederacy sometime in 2001.

But I got something out of it, even if they didn't: A reminder that baseball is still going on during the parts I've stopped paying attention to, where almost nothing ever happens. If you don't watch baseball for six months a year, you can see right away that something at least might happen: The ball is lava and the bases are safe, and you're out whether your teammate hit the ball in the wrong place or a second baseman pranked you. You want to run some more? There isn't a rule keeping you from doing it, specifically; it's just that there are rules about what happens when somebody tags you with the ball, and the other guys have the ball.

My friends, who have no interest in or experience with baseball, who will die calling a run a point, and who were only there because everything is fun if you're in Japan for the first time and met all your friends playing Super Nintendo, knew intuitively that the game was going on between pitches in a way I was not really capable of thinking about.

I think it's because the "between" part of the baseball is governed by the same broad rules as the rest of the sport. Touch all the bases to score a run. Don't let him tag you with the ball. ("So he could just run home during the pitch?" Yes, exactly.)

So when you hit a home run, you run the bases. That's how you score a run, a point, yes, and the defense cannot tag you with the ball because the ball is in the stands. ("Could he just climb up and get it from somebody?" Well, OK, no.)

It would be faster, and probably more immediately entertaining for my friends, to let the guy who hit the home run strike a giant Papa-John's-branded gong. (Watch Albert Pujols run the bases after yesterday's home run and you will wish it just for his sake.) Home runs happen constantly, and the game is built to incentivize hitting more of them, so the seconds would add up fast.

But getting rid of the home run trot would be needless complexity: It would hide a simple, nearly universal fact of the rules of baseball behind the "simulate game" button. ("OK so he's bringing the gong out, and four times is a Papa Slam, but that's the same points as the other points." Yes. I am sorry for bringing you here.)

One time in a thousand, a baserunner overruns another baserunner and blows it, or almost blows it. This is completely immaterial to a good argument against the Papa John Dong Gong. The argument is on behalf of all the times it happens exactly as planned.

If you're a beginner, especially, a good rule is as broad as you can reasonably make it: You can generalize it and wield it over the rest of the game without running into edge cases that cause your tedious friend to talk with his mouth full of soft pretzel. A bad rule, and a bad rule change, carves out some non-obvious exception with no corresponding benefit.

You can get on base if you hit the ball and nobody catches it, tags you, beats you to the base with the ball. Sometimes it's because you got a hit, sometimes it's because the defense messed up, but it's the same base. Baseball does not care whether you're throwing four balls by mistake or on purpose; the batter is entitled to a base. The existing intentional walk conserves rules perfectly: It's not a rule at all, just the organic adaptation of a much broader one.

Baseball does care about whether you're throwing at a batter by mistake or on purpose, because all broad rules fall down at some point: It's more important to stop headhunting than it is to conserve on-base events, like keeping catchers healthy into their fifties is more important than keeping baserunning perfectly organic around home plate. The infield fly and the balk are confusing and totally opaque, but in the face of game-breaking bugs it's tough to resist a solution, even a messy, arbitrary one. (Even big chunks of the broadest rules are built on fear: We must protect baseball from the fair-foul bunt.)

Baseball is slow, but it's insane to cut into a live-ball situation, along one of the foundational rules of the sport, with the hope of fishing a couple of seconds out of the incision. (Know this: The powers that be are trying to distract you from their failure to bring Nomar Garciaparra and Skip Schumakerr to justice.) An intentional walk is far from the most boring thing that happens at a baseball stadium, even in America. ("Do all the teams also have marching bands in America?" I'm sorry, no, it wasn't my decision.)

More importantly, it's applied baseball. It is constantly being reivented, discovered independently, by people who are like my friends. The pitcher can't just stand there forever if he doesn't want to pitch to this batter ("This Canadian guy, Field of Dreams guy I think, wrote this book, actually--this other book--where, I think,") but couldn't he just throw the ball way outside, then?

I don't even like the intentional walk. Just pitch to the guy. But thousands of games in, hours and hours of intentional walk later, I still wait for the feeling I got the first time I saw a pitcher look overmatched, and the guy they were talking about on Sportscenter was up, and the coach-no-manager looked nervous, and I thought, hey, they don't want this guy, Rich CroushoreGene StechschulteLuther HackmanBrad ThompsonKelvin JimenezDean Kiekhefer, pitching to this other guy, so could they, will they--Yes, exactly.

Most of my friends will never go to a sporting event in America either way, so as far as baseball was concerned I was playing with house money. (Working at a videogame merchandise company is great; nobody will ever ask or tell me what time the Super Bowl is.) There are lots of proposals for creating casual baseball fans, and God knows which ones will work. But here are two: Baseball can shave thirty seconds off the one or five or ten games casual fans will watch in a year, or it can keep giving them this slightly boring lottery-ticket chance at the thirty seconds right after the rules finally stick and the whole field comes into focus--you could see the whole field where we were, every bit of ratty astroturf, but only one of the marching bands--in which they not only understand the present but are suddenly capable of predicting the future.

It was a good at-bat, Dan or Tim said—I can't remember which. Jeremy Hazelbaker, down 0-2, looped the fifth pitch he saw into the horse latitudes in left field to put the Cardinals up 7-2.

And I thought—typically, maintaining eligibility for the Every TV Broadcaster's Good At-Bat Award means taking at least one ball before you foul off a bunch of two-strike pitches. But Hazelbaker is competing with Randal Grichuk for playing time, right now, and Grichuk has played to our worst fears, striking out 8 times in 15 plate appearances. And maybe, says the ex-sportswriter, here's the thing Jeremy Hazelbaker has to recommend himself against a guy who slugged .548 in 103 games last year.

So I checked, and, well, it isn't. Grichuk has been unusually bad ending at-bats on an 0-2 count: He's 3-43 with one double and zero sacrifice flies. (Stephen Piscotty, our control group, is 2-19; the NL, last year, hit .145, 6-ish of 43. Also, if you wanted to call Stephen Piscotty "Control Group" all the time, or just when a PG-rated nickname is called for, I wouldn't be bothered by it.)

But ZiPS has Hazelbaker striking out more often than Grichuk, though less often than Grichuk did last year; as a minor leaguer he struck out about as often as Grichuk did, with a better walk rate.

It's a push, at best—and if the Cardinals wanted to privilege contact over power, they could probably just pick Mike O'Neill back up.

The likely position is the simpler one—

“Matheny Loves Grichuk” and “Matheny Buried Diaz Already” theories can’t stand against the force of “Matheny Likes What You Did Yesterday"

But, OK, probably also not that simple. I think Jeremy Hazelbaker played because he's outhit Randal Grichuk over the last [extremely short and unpredictive period of time]. But there's a distinction to make here: I don't think Mike Matheny sits guys because he wants to win now and he believes the last [extremely short and unpredictive period of time] is predictive. I think he does it believing it will help the guy who sits as well as the guy he tosses a start. (That is, he thinks it's descriptive of something—Randal Grichuk is struggling in a way that may be helped by a day off and a million swings in the cage.)

He could well be wrong; I have learned, as an ex-sportswriter, to never bet against "an impossible rat king of tiny inputs masquerading as random chance has fooled you into believing you have an insight" as the truth behind something I'm worried or excited about. But like most ideas that come into being for reasons beyond my need to write tweets against them, there is an actual rationale behind it, and multiple confused and frustrated human beings trying to use it to solve the problem that may or may not exist.

Ruben Tejada is Aledmys Diaz with the excitement sucked out. He's nine months older than Diaz—one baseball-year—but while Diaz was hitting .315/.404/.500 in baseball stadiums most of my readers were legally barred from visiting, Tejada was... I need to back up.

Before Tejada was Aledmys Diaz with the excitement sucked out, he was Jose Reyes with the excitement sucked out, and most of the Jose Reyes. I can't testify to what he was before that, and whether it was exciting, but from the moment he turned 20 and replaced the Mets' previous teenaged shortstop his career has been characterized mostly by our refusal to be interested in it.

We've had plenty of opportunities. Ruben Tejada was a 20-year-old starter at a glamor position in New York. He was an above-average hitter for the position at 21. Now he's a $1.5 million, 26-year-old patch on the Cardinals' Jhonny Peralta problem.

And each time: Nothing. At 20 he had nothing but being 20 to recommend him—no defensive reputation, no offensive results, no impressive minor league numbers. He was pushed aggressively... just because he was, as though each minor league team he joined spent half a season watching him hit .260, found nothing to recommend or disqualify him, and shrugged its collective shoulders.

At 21 he paired his .360 on-base percentage with 15 doubles, one triple, and zero quadruples. The interesting parts of Ruben Tejada's game shrink away from attention like a Dickens heroine if you stare too long. He was a surprisingly competent hitter at 21, and he was the same hitter at 25. He draws a lot of walks, but only when he's batting eighth; without the pitcher backing him up his walk rate has hovered around six percent, somewhere in the Kolten Wong latitudes. At shortstop he's somewhere between useable and average.

At 26, he's the Cardinals' field-tested replacement for Jhonny Peralta, in competition with players who haven't had the chance to lose our interest. Aledmys Diaz has the power to hit home runs on purpose, and—more importantly—he finished the season strong, moving out of forgotten gamble territory and into position as the instrument for all our secret Peralta Wally Pipp fantasies. And Jedd Gyorko—well, he's not really a shortstop, and that is exciting. If Ruben Tejada were a little less exposed, or a little less proven, or a little less of an actual shortstop, maybe we wouldn't meet him with so much indifference. Maybe he wouldn't have passed through waivers.

Unfortunately for him, we know who Ruben Tejada is: He's nothing to get excited about. Every signal his teams have ever sent—from his first call-up to his $1.5 million deal—suggests they agree with our valuation.

But unexciting has value, and it doesn't cost the Cardinals any exciting. (The bad kind of new-player exciting, the anxiety, yes; the good kind of exciting, no.) Aledmys Diaz, who a year ago was nearly as unexciting as Ruben Tejada, could probably use a couple of months at AAA to attempt the dangerous trip from exciting-by-obscurity to exciting-in-his-own-right. Jedd Gyorko will get the chance to make a first impression with his bat. Greg Garcia—I like Greg Garcia, but he's two months older than Ruben Tejada. He'll be all right.

You sign Ruben Tejada suspecting that Aledmys Diaz might not be a shortstop and Jedd Gyorko is just barely a second baseman, and preferring to work out both of those suspicions in private, or at least outside of a pennant race. He does what he does, and you don't pay too much attention to it; you're too busy watching Diaz, and talking to your confessor about what you're really willing to do to Jedd Gyorko in front of 40,000 people.

At some point in the next couple of months, either of those situations might tilt from exciting to actionable. That's OK: You're watching them closely, because you don't have to watch the major league infield. And you make the move without a second thought. Because you don't have to spend much time thinking about Ruben Tejada.

Jason Heyward was born to opt out of his big long-term contract. The point at the intersection of his unusual career so far and the swelling-but-still-cautious baseball market, in the middle of the TV rush, is a huge contract and the promise of a second huge contract.

And the result of that intersection, the combination of current events and Heyward's youth, is one of the only opt-out deals that can't console fans of his new team with thoughts of escaping the decline years they'd have subsidized five years ago. Those years aren't even under contract.

By making an offer the Cardinals have announced their willingness to play some variation this game. If it's true they offered less money per year than the Cubs, they've stopped short of fully accepting the new rules for signing a 26-year-old free agent. But unless it comes out that they were offering no opt-out at all it's clear that they aren't philosophically opposed to the idea.

But the new idea falls on young and old players, cornerstones and stopgaps. Whichever team signs Alex Gordon will pay for the middle of his career with the end of his career, like teams used to. But for two or three years, while the Cubs are paying Jason Heyward for his youth, Alex Gordon's team will get a great defensive outfielder and an unorthodox but effective hitter.

Then Alex Gordon, still under contract, will get old. And then someone—the Cubs or someone else—will finally get the chance to pay for Jason Heyward's age-31 season with his age-38 season.

An old player on an opt-out is a bullet your team might dodge; you forfeit the end of his peak and in exchange are relieved of the beginning of the end. A young player on an opt-out is unilateral disarmament—you give up the chance of piling up surplus value and accept the risk of paying a disappointing player.

It would be great to lock up the good Jason Heyward for 10 years, but Jason Heyward and his agents know it would be great, and now it is impossible. He's just too young to be a free agent as we understand them; he's a draft pick with three years of team control where the floor is Jason Heyward slugging .390.

Project Jason Heyward and Alex Gordon for three years. Figure out how much you'll be paying them in their dotage if they disappoint, or defensive metrics shift, or some of the air escapes from the TV bubble. Put a value on the slim but real possibility that Alex Gordon plays well deep into his thirties. Now that we understand what was impossible all along it could be that this was always the best option the Cardinals had.

Or forget about it, and play the game, and play it better. Call Justin Upton, and see if he's heard about opt-outs yet.

It's 3015, and you're an archaeologist studying the ancient Midwest, and it is still true, 500 years after the Third Postal War, that the only people who send paper letters anymore are the cranks. You've gotten a couple of them a week ever since your article came out, written edge to edge in handwriting like Arial Black's bow-legged nephew, a few too many American flag stamps on each one.

They all say the same thing, basically: What kind of asshole do you have to be to believe Stan Musial didn't exist?

You grew up living and breathing archaeology and it is hard for you to remember a time when you didn't understand the scholarly consensus on Stan Musial, but your wife saw the eye-rolling response you planned to send and threatened to leak it to a talk radio station if you actually did. Now you stay quiet, but you open every one, and you read it from the beginning, the Dear Asshole, to the end, where they still have so much to say and seem only to have run out of paper.

Now that you're back in the field, at the dig, they come once a month, in thick bundles. (Tell Busch is deep inside the Flyover Lands, and the roads don't open very often, not even for the United States Postal Service of the Permanent Revolution.)

Here's what your wife says you should say: Stan Musial was not a real man, sure, but that does nothing to invalidate his teachings or the stories we tell about him, and how important all that is to people. As the mythical founder of the Cardinal Way he's had an undeniable impact on the way we take the extra base, and run out every groundball, and carry ourselves with an unselfconscious dignity.

And okay, sure, on a press release, maybe. But archaeologists owe it to each other to put up a united front about these things, whether it's to cranks or undergraduates. Here's how you put it in ARCH 101: Lots of cultures have mythical founders, and those mythical founders have a lot of things in common.

They live forever, their exploits stretching back into a period the real founders of the society only hazily remember.

They embody not just one but every cultural norm that separates their society from their neighbors. At work they behave with all the culture's fetishized dignities; at home they avoid every taboo and inhabit every generosity that binds the culture together. They are the walls that surround the culture and the soil it grows in.

They are—if not the biggest and the strongest—the best, the shrewdest, the fastest and the hardest-working, and they oversee a miraculous flourishing unlike anything actually discernable in the historical record.

They're overloaded with meaning, is the point, and if you are not a member of a culture it is trivial to distinguish between its actual historical figures—its prickly and severe Bob Gibsons and Alberts Pujols—and its mythological heroes. People who believe in the Cardinal Way—the hardliners, that is, there are good, modern apples in every bushel—know as well as anybody else that Baseball Bugs Bunny was not a real person. It's just their own heroes they can't stop believing in.

You're a good archaeologist and a good, reasonable man. But there's just nothing you're going to do to make them shut up about Stan Musial.

Adam Wainwright is not healthy. He might feel healthy, in the at-least-now-it's-over-with way we feel good about pitchers who have already served their time on the DL and guilty and nervous about pitchers who haven't, but I'm not sure that principle applies to lower-body injuries and anyway he's 34.

Carlos Martinez is not healthy. He's escaped what Baseball Prospectus used to call the Injury Nexus, through which can't-miss pitching prospects between 18 and 22 escape to alternate universes, but shutting a young pitcher down for "shoulder fatigue" is one of those tough decisions that only feels good in hindsight, after he's thrown 200 brilliant innings.

If the Cardinals hacked the Astros, it's terrible—whether it gave them an advantage or not, whether it was one guy or several—and they should be punished for it. I don't have a really strong opinion on what the punishment should be, though that will probably have a lot to do with who did this and who knew about it.

The good thing about stealing signs or throwing a spitball is that they are not actual crimes—they exist within the boundaries of baseball, not the distended appendix we grudgingly accept in exchange for bigger stadiums, better TV coverage, sophisticated drafting and scouting, etc. If you are a part of that appendix your main job is—well, it's probably to make money so you don't get fired. But your vocation should be not screwing up the actual part that matters by embarrassing yourself like this.

If you are writing a thinkpiece piece about the Self-Important Cardinals Getting What's Coming To Them I appreciate your devotion to uncovering hypocrisy, the one true internet sin, but I ask that you please remember that Cardinals fans are the self-important ones, and the Cardinals organization employs whoever it was who tried to guess Jeff Luhnow's AIM password like a pack of sixth graders.

If there are a bunch of us suddenly coming out in favor of corporate espionage, by all means, expose us, but I don't think it comes as a shock that our hyper-analytical front office and everybody else's hyper-analytical front offices have much more in common with each other than they do with us or with some tradition stretching back to Branch Rickey. And I don't think anybody's front office spends a lot of time lauding Aaron Miles for playing the right kind of baseball.

This is probably hypocrisy inasmuch as whoever did it probably wouldn't have publicly come out in favor of skimming passwords yesterday, but it doesn't have much to do with your panting, ragged obsession with the idea that Cardinals fans might like baseball for different reasons than you do.

A BONUS TIP

The St. Louis Cardinals have indicated that they won't pursue Jon Jay, who becomes a free agent weeks after being awarded a second consecutive Gold Glove.

Jay's agent, Nez Balelo, said Friday that his client will be looking for a contract that reflects his importance on both sides of the ball. "A first baseman fields 1500 chances a year, and I think [Jay] helped some people understand how important that is. Teams ignore it at their own peril."

Jay, who began his career as a center fielder, moved to first base midway through the 2015 season and impressed baseball observers with his speed and defensive focus.

"A guy like Jon Jay isn't thinking about hitting home runs when it's time to field a bunt," Cardinals manager Mike Matheny said.

Jay's replacement knows he has small shoes to fill.

"People don't think of first basemen as big, slow sluggers, but I'm not going to be Jon," Matt Holliday said. "You just go out there and do what's best for the team."